Question / Help Trying to start streaming, come across a few issues...

[Throthnir]

Hey everyone!

I usually just search for other users with the same related issues, but this time I have a feeling it will take a long time to find the fix to the issues that I am having with OBS. I decided to come here and post my issues, so perhaps in the future this post will help other people.

Yesterday my WIFI got changed from Sky Broadbands regular service to their "fibre optic" broadband service, and so far I am happy with the results. My download speed looks to be about 30MB/s on average and my Upload speed being about 8MB/s average (Speedtest.net) which equates to about 2.5Mb/s downloads on games or whatever via steam, and the upload seems to be about 7-8Mb/s upload speed when OBS is up etc.

I wanted to start streaming, and join the Twitch community in doing so. I decided to use OBS as some of my favourite streamers use it. Now, let's get down to the issues.

I WANT to stream World of Warcraft Primarily, and I was having lots and lots of issues with it to begin with. FPS was the main issue, I would have it set to 60 in OBS and I would play the game, and I would have people tell me that the stream is very FPS-Laggy and I watched back one of the archives and it looked to be about 4-5 FPS. Quite a few times, I would tab over to OBS whilst streaming and the entire OBS program would be frozen however it wasn't "not responding" at the top either. It just wouldn't let me do anything. After about 6-7 seconds, the OBS software would unfreeze, and the Bitrate at the bottom right would jump to 80000KB/s which my internet is not capable of at all, and I think is just a fault with OBS.

On the 1st of December, I'm starting an apprenticeship earning roughly £100 a week. That means £400 a month, however £75 of that (roughly) will be going to my parents to help with some of the bills. I'm 17 (Incase you were wondering). I want to invest alot of money to my computer, and get it to be basically a monster, really good for streaming and has no problems with FPS whatsoever. My dad works primarily in IT, website design and working with computer hardware is what he does which means I have no problems with installing components bought later on into my existing system. If possible, can some of you leave links for what you think is good pieces of hardware for a streaming computer, graphics card, motherboard, processor etc.

I'll upload printscreens of all of my OBS settings below.

Also, here is my current hardware.

Thank you all,

Jon

 

[DrKoin]

I think the issue starts with your current hardware as it seems quite weak. All your settings seem (almost) OK as far as I can tell, but the common thing to do is to also post a log so that people can see where the encoding is going wrong :)

A few things though : are you playing WoW using a 1280*768 resolution? As this is a 5/3 resolution it seems unlikely now that 16/9 monitors have been around for quite some times. The correct 16/9 ratio would be 1280*720. Not that this would affect your stream but I just find this strange !
Second, your bitrate is probably too high for your current resolution ; try lowering it to 1700-2000 instead. Also, I must confess I didn't fully understand your statement about your upload speed, but maybe it can just barely support a 3500 BR encoded stream.
Third, you will have to tune your FPS down to 30, I fear.

As for the hardware :
I'm not expert at all and can't really give you a solid answer other than "well take the highest CPU you can with a little bias for the intels because of the iGPU and Quick Synch availabilty ( despite QS encoding not being the best-looking around ) and take the latest GPU ( with a little bias toward Nvidia to benefit from Shadowplay / NVenc if need be )".

I'd say though that maybe, just maybe, you could think about keeping your current hardware and use it to make a 2 computers-stream. This way, your gaming rig wouldn't need to be as high-end and expensive. Trust me, and that's not me trying to sound like a condescending jerk, but you don't want to spend all your hard-earned money into a computer when you already have to help your parents with the bills ( unless this is a deal rather than a need ). Top gear costs a lot, and it costs even more because it's top gear. I'd advise you to look into the second or even the third best thing, as prices are likely to be way lower while performances will still be very good. And WoW especially isn't really a very ressource-hungry game !

So yeah maybe someone with more experience using 2 computers can tell you whether you current hardware could handle exclusively live-encoding a stream brought though a capture card from another, dedicated gaming rig.

 

[Rami Ojala]

I think that computer alone should be enough for 720p@30fps with around 2200 bitrate, also use downscaling in video settings. If you get cpu spikes try lowering wow settings and check for background applications to save all the cpu you can get. Try not to get too ambitious on your stream settings 60fps stream (imho) is very expensive to get to run properly since you basically need to double the bitrate if you want to keep your image quality and it is VERY taxing on your cpu. In all honesty not many people can view that without twitch transcoding so you would basically shoot yourself in the leg. 720p@30fps is very watchable and crisp if your settings are right.